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HI, I am a rising sophomore parent and after reading CC for well over a year now, I thought I would just chime in with a few of my own personal comments to many of the questions raised. First let me say we are thrilled with Furman, we are from New Jersey and our D adapting to the southern way of life was very easy. Despite what may be thought of the Furman demographics being mainly southern there is a significant number of students from the northeast as well as other parts of the country. Although most of my D's friends are not from the NE, she had on her hall last year 4 girls from NJ alone. Now about telelphone service-- Verizon is the way to go. D had and has Verizon but many friends did not. So in the first few months the non verizon students discovered there was lousy service and eventually did switch to Verizon. Unfortunately, those first few months we had to increase the text message package 3x to accomodate the volume our D rec'vd and sent as so many did have ATT, which limits the number of characters they will accept from another carrier os our D needed to send 2 messages for every one rec'vd in many cases. I am happy to report we are now back on a more reasonably priced text message package! I did also want to mention a word about advisors. It sounds like many have gotten very good advisors, sadly, our D's situation was not as great. When we attended orientation and met with her assigned advisor, we felt he was fabulous, he talked a great game. The long and the short of it was, he was never reachable, never in his office and never replied to emails. My D needing to discuss her second semester schedule and finally had to reach out to another advisor for help in selecting her courses. The advisor apparently needs to "flip a switch" to enable students to register for classes and on the last day of registration she rec'vd an email from him saying he was out of the country and he released her record so that she could register. She never had one conversation with him and definitely no guidance. I have to say her schedule was terribly challenging and her GPA did suffer a bit, but still acceptable, although not glowing. He again contacted her via email at the end of the year, again without any guidance to next year's course selection or face to face but to advise her she would be getting a new temporary advisor as he would once again be out of the country. This by the way was not an isolated situation with my D only. So my advice to all new students-- be vigilant with your advisors and if you don't hear back timely address the situation immediately, my D did not want to seem like a pest and also did not want to report the situation. I am sure this is the exclusion not the norm, but just be aware that this can happen. Regarding registration-- After looking at the course selections, go to [url=http://www.ratemyprofessor.com] and get some feedback on the professor teaching the course before you make your selection. There are many great professors at Furman, but there are also some that you would rather not take classes from, so do your homework! I am sure there are many other subjects I can fill you in on, so feel free to call on me. Good luck to all ---parents and students.
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